There is a common problem in telecommunications in which optical fibers have multiple communications channels embedded in it in terms of different colors of light which are transmitting different streams of information. One of the problems is to split out these channels so that they can be separately processed, for instance to adjust intensity, polarization and dispersion or color spread.
It is also often important in optical communications to be able to modify each of the individual wavelengths of light differently and then be able to combine the processed channels so as to recombine them back into a single fiber. Thus, it is important to break out from a single fiber the individual spatial components, to process them and to inject them back into a single fiber.
While the telecommunications problem described above is important, it is also important to be able to use such a multiplexer for instance to be able to generate high energy laser beams. Presently fiber lasers exist which can produce hundreds of watts of light within an individual glass fiber. Unfortunately, these intensity levels are not enough for some military and industrial applications. The problem then becomes how to be able to utilize fiber lasers and to provide a combined output to be able to dramatically increase the energy delivered by the system.
There is also a problem with respect to infrared laser countermeasure devices in which laser beams modulated to countermeasure for instance an incoming missile, require a considerable amount of energy on target to be able to robustly provide the countermeasuring function.
One type of laser used in infrared countermeasures is the so-called quantum cascade or semiconductor laser. It is highly desirable for these applications to achieve higher laser powers in a low-divergence beam. It is therefore important to be able to augment or combine semiconductor laser outputs to provide for instance a 10 watt modulated beam on target.
Up to this juncture, there has been no effective way to combine the outputs of fiber lasers or semiconductor lasers to be able to significantly increase the power emitted in a laser beam.
Moreover, it is important in the military context to be able to provide the power amplification modules in a sufficiently small form, to be able to be for instance carried by a missile, carried in a DIRCM head on the belly of an aircraft, or to provide small enough packaging to be able to be readily used in any applications where space is at a premium.
By way of further background, optical multiplexer/demultiplexers are optical instruments that separate out the wavelength spectral components contained in a single input light source. Operated in reverse, the same instrument combines multiple light sources of single color light into a single output beam. In other terminology, a optical multiplexer/demultiplexer demultiplexes the wavelengths in the forward direction and multiplexes the several beams in the reverse direction. In the field of fiber optics communication, for example, the communication bandwidth of a single fiber has been greatly increased using wavelength division multiplexing, or WDM, techniques. Similarly, the measurement and control the properties of individual wavelengths propagating in the fiber, which is critical to the performance and operation of these WDM systems, is performed by demultiplexing the wavelengths into individual control channels.
Grating based optical multiplexer/demultiplexers are generally made up of five functional components; an input point source or linear slit, a collimating optic, the grating, an imaging optic, and one or more receiving components in the output image. When operated as a multiplexer, the one or more receiving components are replaced by narrowband light sources and the input source is replaced by a single receiving component.
Light emerging from the input source is collimated by the collimating optic so that a planar wavefront impinges on the (plane) grating. The grating breaks the single input beam up into multiple beams, with each wavelength propagating in a unique direction. The imaging optic collects these diffracted beams and focuses them into spots at an output plane, where each spot corresponds to a wavelength in the source. The spot corresponding to any single wavelength has finite size, said size primarily being a function of the optical system and the grating. Operated as a multiplexer, the multiple narrowband sources (fiber laser outputs, for example) are positioned in the “output” plane at positions that correspond to their central wavelengths. The imaging optic now functions as a collimator, bringing the multiple wavelength collimated beams together on the grating, impinging on the grating at a angle determined by the location of the source in the output plane. The grating redirects each beam through a unique angle, which angle ideally brings each beam to be coaxial with all the other beams. Finally the collimating optic brings all the parallel collimated beams into a common focal spot at which is located a receiving element.
One object of the present invention is to simplify the optical configuration of optical multiplexer/demultiplexers by reducing the number of independent optical elements needed. It is another object of this invention to provide a physically large output spectral field while maintaining a compact, easy to package form factor. Yet another object of this invention is to provide a optical multiplexer/demultiplexer using a grating in a near-Littrow configuration.
In an alternative configuration, it is an object of this invention to provide improved spectral resolution using only spherical reflective optics.
In another configuration, it is an object of this invention to provide wavelength multiplexer in which multiple independent light sources can be combined into a single coincident output beam.
In yet another configuration it is an object of this invention to provide a region of space in which individual spectral components from the source are physically accessible.
A further object of this configuration is to enable the manipulation or filtering of individual spectral components.
Yet another object of this invention is to recombine filtered spectral components back into a single beam similar in form to the source.
It is a still further object of the subject invention to provide a compact optical multiplexer/demultiplexer for use as a multiplexer/demultiplexer in a telecommunications mode and to be able to combine laser beams of different wavelengths or frequencies to provide highly intense laser beams.